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Animals Eat Each Other by Elle Nash

Animals Eat Each Other by Elle Nash

DESCRIPTION

In this stunning debut, a girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a Satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it’s all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased, abandoning even her own name in favor of a new one: Lilith.

As Lilith grows closer to Matt, she begins to recognize the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Frances, and finds herself balancing on a knife’s edge between pain and pleasure, the promise of the future and the crushing isolation of the present. With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it.

“A scintillating work of literary erotica...the way [Lilith] elucidates and wrestles with her sexuality and identity is perceptive and raw.”—Book Riot

“The first page of Animals Eat Each Other knocked me on my ass...Elle writes with an incredible amount of intensity and emotional honesty and, damn it, just read this book.”—Lit Reactor

“Electric, sensual, and brutally human, Nash explores the boundaries (or lack thereof) when it comes to sexual desire. It is an exquisitely crafted work where every sentence feels so important, so real that it stings the skin. ... A supremely gripping work....a remarkable novel that crackles from beginning to end.”—Medium

“Raw, moving, and utterly original.”—Popsugar

“An unsettling work in the tradition of books delving into the emotionally ragged connections that form in the least likely places.”—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“Nash is an acute observer of human appetites, and Animals Eat Each Other establishes her as a voice on the rise.”—The Masters Review

“A mélange of sex and violence and drug use and teenage ennui . . . a devastating first book.”—The Fanzine

“A hair-raising tale of sex and drugs and self-harm and self-hatred well outside the safe boundaries of New York Lit”—3 AM

“Elle Nash's Animals East Each Other is a desire map, a cartography of eros. Two women and a man weave their contradictions and obsessions and aches into one another until names, bodies, and selves dissolve and reconstitute in ways they could not have imagined. Mirrorings, doublings, triplings, and reproductions bring the right questions to the surface: who are we when we enter into love stories? Does anyone know? A heartbomb.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

“A savage, nuanced dive into the dynamics of queer sexuality, love and anti-love, jealousy, sadomasochism, Satanism, and everything else caught in the fray of a woman's self-abandonment. Nash's subtly spare prose renders matter-of-fact what we're so often afraid to articulate to ourselves, let alone to the people we give ourselves over to.”—Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State

“Animals Eat Each Other reminds me of the ’80s, with its Satanism and ménage à trois teen lifestyle and atheism in the face of mass Christianity. Elle Nash has written a novel you can’t put down, even if the Satanic Bible or a deck of Tarot cards is within your reach.”—Elizabeth Ellen, author of Person/a

“If Holden Caulfield was the face of adolescence during Salinger’s era, then Nash’s Lilith represents the face of today’s youth as they struggle to come-of-age in a world where people are increasingly more and more alienated... Nash does not flinch when she captures the realities she has chosen as her subject: This is a portrait of addiction. This is the story of a girl caught in a particular purgatory between high school and adulthood...we have to look, even if and when some of us will undoubtedly see ourselves looking back.”—Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, author of Fig

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELLE NASH is the author of Animals Eat Each Other. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Her work has been featured in Volume 1 Brooklyn, The Fanzine,Cosmopolitan, Elle, The Offing, Enclave, and other places. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, daughter and their dog. Occasionally she reads tarot in exchange for money.